the absurd regulation black one, too much affected by all well-to-do folk, lay as well as clerical, in the West Indies.  The school seemed good enough in all ways.  A senior class of young men—­including one who had had his head nearly cut off last year by misapplication of that formidable weapon the cutlass, which every coloured man and woman carries in the West Indies—­could read pretty well; and the smaller children—­ with as much clothing on as they could be persuaded to wear—­were a sight pleasant to see.  Among them, by the by, was a little lady who excited my astonishment.  She was, I was told, twelve years old.  She sat summing away on her slate, bedizened out in gauze petticoat, velvet jacket—­between which and the petticoat, of course, the waist showed just as nature had made it—­gauze veil, bangles, necklace, nose-jewel; for she was a married woman, and her Papa (Anglice, husband) wished her to look her best on so important an occasion.

This over-early marriage among the Coolies is a very serious evil, but one which they have brought with them from their own land.  The girls are practically sold by their fathers while yet children, often to wealthy men much older than they.  Love is out of the question.  But what if the poor child, as she grows up, sees some one, among that overplus of men, to whom she, for the first time in her life, takes a fancy?  Then comes a scandal; and one which is often ended swiftly enough by the cutlass.  Wife-murder is but too common among these Hindoos, and they cannot be made to see that it is wrong.  ’I kill my own wife.  Why not?  I kill no other man’s wife,’ was said by as pretty, gentle, graceful a lad of two-and-twenty as one need see; a convict performing, and perfectly, the office of housemaid in a friend’s house.  There is murder of wives, or quasi-wives now and then, among the baser sort of Coolies—­murder because a poor girl will not give her ill-earned gains to the ruffian who considers her as his property.  But there is also law in Trinidad, and such offences do not go unpunished.

Then on through Savanna Grande and village again, and past more sugar estates, and past beautiful bits of forest, left, like English woods, standing in the cultivated fields.  One batch of a few acres on the side of a dell was very lovely.  Huge Figuiers and Huras were mingled with palms and rich undergrowth, and lighted up here and there with purple creepers.

So we went on, and on, and into the thick forest, and what was, till Sir Ralph Woodford taught the islanders what an European road was like, one of the pattern royal roads of the island.  Originally an Indian trace, it had been widened by the Spaniards, and transformed from a line of mud six feet broad to one of thirty.  The only pleasant reminiscence which I have about it was the finding in flower a beautiful parasite, undescribed by Griesbach; {192} a ’wild pine’ with a branching spike of crimson flowers, purple tipped, which shone in the darkness of the bush like a great bunch of rosebuds growing among lily-leaves.